Liberals will be thrilled: because the people that the rabid terrorists most want to murder are the ones that liberals also most want to murder: Christians and people who believe in Judeo-Christian morality.

My God, we ought to redefine the 9/11/2001 terror attack as an act of workplace violence. I mean, after all, all the 3,000 people who died were at their workplace, right? And it was violent, wasn’t it? I mean, just like what we always called the terrorist bombing at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma back in 1995. The victims were at THEIR workplace and it was violent too. So we’ve never actually HAD a terrorist attack in America.

All we need is Obama’s lies and we can completely redefine the whole damn universe if we want to. And all you have to be is a pathologically dishonest fool and “truth” is a rubber thing that can be bended and twisted into any shape you like.

WASHINGTON — President Obama acknowledged in an interview broadcast on Sunday that the United States had underestimated the rise of the Islamic State militant group, which has seized control of a broad swath of territory in the Middle East, and had placed too much trust in the Iraqi military, allowing the region to become “ground zero for jihadists around the world.”

Reflecting on how a president who wanted to disentangle the United States from wars in the Middle East ended up redeploying to Iraq and last week expanding air operations into Syria, Mr. Obama pointed to assessments by the intelligence agencies that said they were surprised by the rapid advances made in both countries by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

“Our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that, I think, they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria,” Mr. Obama said on “60 Minutes,” the CBS News program, referring to James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence. Mr. Obama added that the agencies had overestimated the ability and will of the Iraqi Army to fight such Sunni extremists. “That’s true. That’s absolutely true,” he said.

In citing Mr. Clapper, Mr. Obama made no mention of any misjudgment he may have made himself. Critics have repeatedly pointed to his comment last winter characterizing groups like the Islamic State as a “JV team” compared with the original Al Qaeda.

But he rebutted critics who say his refusal to intervene more directly in the Syrian civil war and his decision to pull all American troops out of Iraq in 2011 had created conditions that allowed the rise of the Islamic State. Instead, he pointed a finger at Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, until recently the prime minister of Iraq. “When we left, we had left them a democracy that was intact, a military that was well equipped and the ability then to chart their own course,” Mr. Obama said. “And that opportunity was squandered over the course of five years or so because the prime minister, Maliki, was much more interested in consolidating his Shia base.”

By contrast, he praised Mr. Maliki’s newly installed successor, Haider al-Abadi, whom he met in New York last week, for assembling a more inclusive government that may undercut Sunni support for the Islamic State. Mr. Abadi “so far at least has sent all the right signals,” Mr. Obama said. “We can’t do this for them.”

But he was measured in that assessment, saying there had been “some progress” by the new Baghdad government. “I wouldn’t say great yet,” he said.

Mr. Obama conceded that his strategy would be less likely to succeed in Syria, where he is working at odds with the government rather than in tandem. Mr. Obama has called for President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to step down, but now the two share an enemy in the Islamic State. The United States’ plan relies on trying to build up a separate rebel force that can take on both Mr. Assad’s government and the Islamic State, but Mr. Obama dismissed as “mythology” the notion that he should have done that two years ago.

The President’s comments are being perceived by made observers and analysts as an effort shift blame in the argument over who may have been responsible for not being on top of the situation in the Middle East, and in some sense to the through the intelligence community under the bus, specifically by referencing statements by Director National Intelligence James Clapper from last week. In those statements, Clapper did say that he had underestimated the fighting ability of ISIS fighters and, in tern, overestimated the will to fight of the Iraqi Army. That, however, is a far way from saying that the intelligence community didn’t properly assess what was going on in Syria and Iraq before this summer, and Eli Lake reports that the President’s remarks are already receiving some push back:

Reached by The Daily Beast after Obama’s interview aired, one former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq was flabbergasted. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting,” the former official said.

(…)

Still, other senior intelligence officials have been warning about ISIS for months. In prepared testimony before the annual House and Senate intelligence committees’ threat hearings in January and February, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the recently departed director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the group would likely make a grab for land before the end of the year. ISIS “probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014.” Of course, the prediction wasn’t exactly hard to make. By then, Flynn noted, ISIS had taken the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, and the demonstrated an “ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria.”

The ability of ISIS to hold that territory will depend on its “resources, local support, as well as the responses of [Iraqi security forces] and other opposition groups in Syria,” Flynn added. He noted that while many Sunnis likely opposed ISIS, “some Sunni tribes and insurgent groups appear willing to work tactically with [ISIS] as they share common anti-government goals.”

Flynn was not alone. Clapper himself in that hearing warned that the three most effective jihadist groups in Syria—one of which he said was ISIS—presented a threat as a magnet for attracting foreign fighters. John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, said he thought both ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, al Qaeda’s formal franchise in Syria, presented a threat to launch external operations against the West.

It’s worth noting that January was when President Obama was referring to ISIS and other groups that had spun off from “core” al Qaeda as the “jayvee” team in what seemed at the time as a way of saying that they didn’t pose nearly the threat to the United States that they would like to think, or that al Qaeda did in the time before September 11th. I’m not sure how much I’d read into those January comments, though. To some degree, it seemed to me at the time that they were part of an Administration strategy to diminish the importance of ISIS/ISIL internationally. It may not have been a wise strategy, but I’m not sure that, in and of themselves, the President’s remarks in January were an indication that he didn’t take see the group as a potential threat. As Lake notes, if that’s what he actually believed then he apparently wasn’t paying attention to his own intelligence briefings.

That being said, the President deserves criticism for attempting to pawn off responsibility for missing the ISIS threat on the intelligence community. This is especially true given the fact that “they” appear to have been well aware of ISIS long before the summer and, presumably, were briefing the President on the matter as warranted. At the very least, it is a marked difference from the idea expressed in Harry Truman’s famous maxim that “the buck stops here,” meaning that the President is ultimately responsible for everything that happens under his watch. Even if it were true that the intelligence community dropped the ball here, which is most certainly what the President was implying in his interview last night, the President is the one who should take public responsibility when something goes wrong. If it turns out down the road that personnel changes are warranted because of what happened, then that’s a different issue. As a broad matter, the President, any President, owes it to the American people to take responsibility for what his Administration does and what it fails to do. Instead of that, however, the President is asking us to believe that if something went wrong with regard to our response to the supposed ISIS threat, it wasn’t his fault. That’s not leadership.

Our soldiers and our generals and our intelligence professionals have no confidence in their commander-in-chief’s leadership. Period.

When I served in the military, I heard a formula about leadership that is common in today’s business world: real leaders always take responsibility; they never take credit. Obama has turned that formula on its head. He is an antileader. The way he is an antichrist.

“I know some in Washington would like us to start leaving Iraq now. To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we are ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region and for the United States. It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaeda. It would mean that we’d be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It would mean we’d allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It would mean increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous.” — George W. Bush, 2007

James Clapper is still on the job in this administration for one reason and one reason only. He has lost all credibility and forfeited any legitimacy, yes. But he is a man who is willing to lie for his boss and cover up his boss’ crimes. And THAT is what Obama values, rather than the trust of the American people or rather than a competent executive.

Obama can literally say or do anything and have an “expert” to back up his impossibly deceitful version of reality.

On the other side of that equation of personal and professional dishonor is Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. Unlike James Clapper, he put the security of the United States of America before Obama. Which means he had to go. Which is why he was one out of more than nine senior generals purged by Obama.

By the way, given the fact that the United States under Obama clearly had absolutely no idea that the ISIS threat was coming, according to Obama, how the hell is it that Obama believes he has complete and certain intelligence that he can know precisely what is going on in Iran as he negotiates that nation into a nuclear state???

President Obama: Well, what I’m saying is that we are assisting Iraq in a very real battle that’s taking place on their soil, with their troops. But we are providing air support. And it is in our interest to do that because ISIL represents sort of a hybrid of not just the terrorist network, but one with territorial ambitions, and some of the strategy and tactics of an army. This is not America against ISIL. This is America leading the international community to assist a country with whom we have a security partnership with. To make sure that they are able to take care of their business.

I mean, holy crap, why doesn’t the Republican Party just start using drones to blow up women and fighter aircraft to bomb women all the damn while denying there’s a freaking war on women??? Then they could be like the Nazi we’ve got in our White House right now.

It’s interesting that Obama actually dragged CBS’ 60 Minutes ratings by 57 percent from what I heard. The prior week the show had over 18 million; with Obama they got 9 million. People are understanding that they’ve heard this blathering liar’s blathering lies before and they’ve heard the sweetheart interviews where nobody asks Obama the questions that they would have been rabidly demanding if a Republican were president.

If Obama can manufacture a name like “the Khorosan Group” to conceal the truth that we are still dealing with a very alive and well core al Qaeda, I have just as much right to come up with a name that exposes the reality of the Obama presidency: now it’s “the Hussein Terror Network.”

I remember several years ago watching a fascination PBS program on presidential leadership. The documentary’s poster-boy for pathetic presidential leadership was Jimmy Carter. Obviously the man was intelligent, but the experts on leadership said “intelligence” does not a leader make. Jimmy Carter was particularly faulted for not empowering his subordinates with enough power to do their jobs; he micromanaged and undermined through a tiny cadre of close advisors. And as a result the nation drifted like a ship without a rudder. That is clearly what is being described by Hillary Clinton now.

The PBS program did not make mention of the fact that Jimmy Carter was (and clearly still is) a fool with a totally bogus worldview. A false worldview makes it impossible to act intelligently because, no matter how intelligent one is, one cannot possibly comprehend reality. And I would submit that Both Carter and Obama have tragically and truly flawed views of the world. Both of these men view the world through a set of theories that are simply totally false. And from their poor foundations, all of their intelligence goes into the fruitless process of endlessly rationalizing and justifying their erroneous worldview.

“But I guess it’s more the hypocrisy, the fact that he’s saying yesterday, as he did in the town hall, we’re not going to rest for a minute until we solve these economic problems. Well, except after my vacation. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

But choosing an exclusive enclave like the Vineyard after spending three days on the road raving against the rich and the wealthy, and the millionaires and the billionaires, and the corporate jet owners who vacation exactly in the same place, and then spending 10 days in their company, speaks of a kind of dissonance or hypocrisy.

Hypocrites and people who simply are so out-of-touch and disconnected that they don’t live in the real world make for miserable leaders. And a man who rails against the super-rich before hobnobbing with them, and a man who literally says he won’t rest until he solves the nation’s economic crisis THE DAY BEFORE GOING ON VACATION AT MARTHA’S VINEYARDis clearly a massively disconnected hypocrite.

I was watching CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” program Friday morning (August 19 at ( AM Eastern), and Obama’s complete absence of any kind of leadership whatsoever just boiled through.

David Faber and Melissa Lee were talking, and Faber said that never in his life had he seen such a complete absence of leadership out of Washington, and never had that failure of leadership in Washington had such a huge impact on Wall Street.

No one knows what to do. Nobody can issue any kind of accurate predictive forecast because everything depends on Washington, and the leaders are on vacation rather than getting together and beginning the work of negotiation.

Obama announces he has a plan, but he refuses to release it in advance so that both his Democrat side and the Republican side can examine it and work on their own proposals so everyone can hit the ground running. But in all likelihood Obama’s plan has nothing to do with solving problems anyway. Obama has said:

In the clearest expression yet of his 2012 reelection strategy, President Obama said he would send a jobs package to Congress next month, ask lawmakers to pass it, and campaign against them if they refused.

Obama made the declaration in a town-hall-style meeting in Iowa on Monday night. He is facing criticism for not advancing a bold strategy to bolster job growth and his reelection prospects.

Which is to say Obama isn’t interested in solving the nation’s rapidly developing economic crisis; he’s interested in coming up with something that he can use to demagogue his oponents.

Here’s the news as Obama heads off on his vacation without bothering to release his “plan”:

Discouraging economic data from around the globe have heightened fears that another recession is on the way.

Fresh evidence emerged Thursday that U.S. home sales and manufacturing are weakening. Signs also surfaced that European banks are increasingly burdened by the region’s debt crisis and sputtering economy.

The rising anxiety ignited a huge sell-off in stocks that led many investors to seek the safety of U.S. Treasurys.

Economists say the economic weakness and the stock markets’ wild swings have begun to feed on themselves. Persistent drops in stock prices erode consumer and business confidence. Individuals and companies typically then spend and invest less. And when they do, stock prices tend to fall further.

“A negative feedback loop … now appears to be in the making” in both the United States and Europe, Joachim Fels and Manoj Pradhan, economists at Morgan Stanley, said in a report Thursday. Both economies are “dangerously close to a recession. … It won’t take much in the form of additional shocks to tip the balance.”

The risk of a recession is now about one in three, according to Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Among the worrisome economic signs:

_ A survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia shows that manufacturing in the mid-Atlantic region contracted in August by the most in more than two years. The steep drop, on top of a smaller decline in a New York Fed survey this week, means U.S. manufacturing probably contracted in August, economists said.

It would be the first decline since July 2009 _ a worrisome sign because manufacturing has been a key source of U.S. growth in the two years since economists say the Great Recession ended.

_ U.S. home sales fell in July for the third time in four months, the National Association of Realtors said. Sales dropped 3.5 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.67 million homes. That’s far below the 6 million homes that economists say must be sold to sustain a healthy housing market.

Sales are lagging behind last year’s pace _ the weakest since 1997. “There seems to be a correlation between the stock market and home prices,” said Andrew Davidson, a New York-based mortgage industry consultant.

[Article continues]

If Obama actually has any kind of a damn plan, we needed to know it like three years ago.

This isn’t leadership; it’s demagoguery.

We need a commander in chief, and we’ve got a campaigner in chief. And our campaigner in chief is going to campaign us right into the Great Depression.

The markets are rising and falling based on the same sort of empty hope and hype that saw Obama elected in the first place. Right now, they are rising because of hopes that Europe somehow has Greece under control (for like the 12th time!) and because some investors believe Obama is going to announce some bailout for people who can’t afford their homes on the backs of people who didn’t overexpose themselves and paid their bills on time – and they think they can make a short term profit. Which is to say there’s all kinds of “hopey changey” about a plan that Obama hasn’t announced yet and frankly should have announced three years ago if he actually had any ideas.

“He didn’t offer much new or take responsibility for the exploding debt. … The White House doesn’t seem to want to admit it’s been adding to that debt handily.”

Turbo Tax Timothy Geithner (that’s the guy who wasn’t smart enough or honest enough to pay his own taxes before taking a job making him responsible for everyone else paying their taxes) was asked if the White House accepted any responsibility for this disaster. And nope (see also here for video):

Harwood: Do you feel that you or the administration’s policies are in any way responsible for this downgrade?

GEITHNER: Absolutely not. You’ve seen the president work incredibly hard and make really amazing progress trying to heal the damage caused by this terrible crisis. And you saw him work his heart out to try and bring both parties together to reach agreement on a long-term fiscal deal. Made some progress, didn’t solve it all, but a very good down payment.

Democrats are crawling out to any mainstream media venue that allows cockroaches (that’s pretty much any mainstream media venue, mind you) and calls the Tea Party “terrorists.” But the vote on the debt ceiling extension combined with the fact that Democrats never bothered to offer any plan of their own on top of the fact that they still haven’t come up with an F-ING BUDGET after 832 days really ought to point out that when they point a finger at us and call us “terrorists” three fingers are pointing back at themselves.

Democrats would have to quadruple in maturity to even qualify as “infantile.”

Sadly, Bush is the only president who is responsible for anything these days. Did I mention we’re well into the third year of the failed Obama presidency?

Barack Obama says the U.S. always is and always has been a triple-A country, despite its rating agency downgrade.

He said also the U.S. didn’t need a rating agency to tell it that it’s political system was having trouble functioning.

Speaking at the White House on the Standard & Poor’s downgrade, Obama renewed a plea to Congress to take action in September of help create jobs and cushion Americans from a still weak economy.

Obama said financial markets around the world “still believe our credit is triple-A. I and the world’s investor’s agree.”

Well, if “agree” means “panic-selling that puts us into bear-market territory” with a 635 point smackdown that constitutes the sixth largest loss on the Dow in history, then Obama ISN’T completely out-of-touch with reality.

Obama offered no solutions whatsoever. That after not bothering to speak at ALL for the entire weekened after the downgrade was announced on Friday, and apparently after showing up fifty minutes late to his own pony show. The markets were down when Obama started speaking, and after he reasurred the world the markets pretty much said, “That’s it; we’re outa here.”

Disputes downgrade. Quotes Warren Buffett that U.S. should have AAAA rating.
Need “balanced long term approach” — needed “day I took office.” Blames “prolonged debate over debt ceiling” for downgrade, and string of economic disruptions in Japan, Europe and the Middle East.

Solution is simple: “Tax reform that will ask those who can afford it to pay their fair share.” And “modest adjustments” to entitlements.

Not a lack of plans, “insistence on drawing lines in the sand.”

Most immediate concern of Americans is slow pace of recovery coming out of “worst recession” in our lifetimes. Extend payroll tax cut as soon as possible, and extend unemployment insurance payments. One million fewer jobs if don’t do this. Plus, more infrastructure spending.

These are proposals Republicans had agreed to in the past and should agree to now.

“This is the United States of America, no matter what some ratings agency says, we will always be a AAA country.”

So put on your make-believe pirate hats, boys and girls. Because we’re going to live in a fun pretend world where we AREN’T downgraded and all of Obama’s utterly failed policies are just working swell.

I like the way the headline brings out that only Obama’s line in the sand demanding tax hikes will be accepted. If you have your own ideas, you’re responsible for the crisis because OBAMA IS HE WHO MUST NOT BE HELD RESPONSIBLE.

I’ve been pointing out since December 2008 right after Obama was elected that we would be staring into the abyss of a Great Depression due to this evil man’s failed policies. I pointed out in that article that the Great Depression began with a market tank, followed by a series of failed liberal-progressive policies that were like sugar for a diabetic; at first things seemed to get better, and then we had the real crash. You look at what I wrote in that article and tell me that we aren’t right on schedule.

The pathetic performance of President Obama in the debt debate is showing the left how incompetent and weak the leader they selected is. Many are wishing they had Hillary Clinton in the White House instead! Once Obama has to move beyond a set teleprompter speech, he is lost. During the BP disaster, he showed what a poor administrator he is and now he has belied any pretensions to legislative skill. He is the un-Lyndon Johnson.

The consequences of this disillusionment will be profoundly felt in the 2012 election. Republicans and Independents will vote against Obama with their hands. Democrats and liberals will do so with their feet — by staying home. Turnout was the key to Obama’s 2008 electoral majority. The vote among the under 30-year-old Caucasians, African-Americans and Latinos set new records. Obama won, after all, about the same share of the Caucasian vote — in total — that Gore did in 2000. It was only because the Caucasian youth turnout offset defections by its middle aged and elderly. The African-American turnout rose from 11- to 14-percent and Latino votes rose by 1.5 points. It was from these fluctuations that he was able to win. Any diminution of the white-hot intensity of enthusiasm that animated his 2008 election will cost him dearly in the upcoming 2012 election.

Compare the performance of Bill Clinton in the 1995-1996 government budget crisis with that of Obama in the latest skirmish. In Clinton campaign tracking polls, the president’s approval rating rose from 40 percent in May of 1995 to 54 percent in January of 1996. This 14-point increase has its opposite equivalent in Obama’s plunge from 55 percent approval in May of 2011 to 40 percent approval in late July in the Gallup polling. Clinton and Obama’s approval ratings rose and fell by nearly identical amounts.

For Clinton, the standoff was a chance to show his strength. No Republican ever believed the president with a reputation for indecisiveness and wanting-to-please would ever stand up to them. But Clinton did, day after day, hammering away at his position and defending it against all comers. Obama had no plan and his position shifted by the hour. First, he wanted a clean debt limit increase with no budgetary attachments. Then, he would settle for cuts, but only minor ones. Then, he signed on for major cuts as long as there were tax increases to go with them. Finally, he abandoned it all and asked only that the deal last until after the election, so he would not have to go through this process again.

Clinton reaped great credit with Independents and moderates for fashioning a third way between liberal demands for deficits and conservative cuts in Medicare. Obama’s attempts to portray himself as pushing a “balanced approach” proved laughable in view of his surrender at the end. His attempt at negotiations resembled a surrender far more than a compromise. He’s no Henry Clay.

Finally, while Clinton earned the respect of his party’s left wing by his confrontation with Newt Gingrich, Obama has garnered only contempt from his colleagues for his craven inability to prevail despite holding a formidable array of cards in his hand.

That House Speaker John Boehner polled lower than Obama during the confrontation is scant comfort. Boehner is not running for president. When Clinton prevailed in 1996, it was against Bob Dole who was not only the senate majority leader, but was also his opponent for re-election. Clinton and Dole were, indeed, locked in a zero sum game. It does nothing for Obama if Boehner’s ratings drop.

Now Obama will have a devil of a time replenishing the enthusiasm that led his march to victory in 2008. He will instead meet with the same tepid support from his base that doomed Carter in 1980 and Bush Sr. in 1992. His voters are discovering that there is no there.

A big component of this problem is that Barack Obama is a pathologial narcissist. It’s kind of hard to truly attract people to your cause when ultimately your “cause” is all about YOU. Especially if YOU ARE A LOSER like Barack Obama.

Boehner had agreed to a deal that would have involved $800 billion in “revenue” (i.e. TAXES). And then Obama demanded yet another $40o billion. The New York Times demonstrated just how chock full of chutzpah liberals are in saying (In an article entitled “The Party That Can’t Say Yes“):

“So, on the eve of economic calamity, the Republicans killed an overly generous deal largely over a paltry $400 billion in deductions.”

Number one, anybody who thinks $400 billion is “paltry” is psychologically and morally insane – and there is no point trying to negotiate with the insane. Number two, if $400 billion is indeed “paltry,” then surely Obama and the Democrats would have no problem agreeing to the same deal with “revenues” of $400 billion rather than $800 billion. It’s only a “paltry” difference, after all. Both points reveal that these liberals are dishonest and they are in fact sick.

I would submit that we are not negotiating with Democrats in this fight. They are utterly deceitful and not fit negotiating partners. We are trying to win the American people and get them on our side for 2012.

That matters far more than any deal we agree to now.

The media are dishonest in their presentation of the 1995 budget impasse, just as they are dishonest in everything else. The elections of 1996 wasn’t so bad for Republicans. They lost a few seats in the House, but still retained control of that body. And they actually GAINED two seats in the Senate which further solidified their control. Bill Clinton was also forced to say, “The era of big government is over.” And the Republican Congress ultimately forced a balanced budget (which the incredibly cynical and dishonest media gave Clinton total credit for). A good argument can be made that the balanced budgets that we had for a few years in the late 90s was entirely due to the pressure that the Republicans had applied in 1995.

But now aint then.

I would argue that the American people have become worse rather than better since 1995. As my major prima facia example, would this country have elected a Barack Obama in 1995? I don’t think there’s any chance. And it’s not Obama being black that would have destroyed his chances; it’s Obama being a socialist who had spent over 20 years in a racist, Marxist and anti-American “church” with a vile and twisted man like Jeremiah Wright as his “spiritual mentor.” And any conservative who is going to place their trust in the wisdom or goodness of the American people must deal with the sad reality that the American people elected a genuinely evil and foolish man to be their leader in 2008.

My own trust in the American people is quite limited. The Democrat Party tells demonstrable lies. The mainstream media propaganda machine packages those lies. And then ignorant and often stupid people consume them as “facts.” We’re in trouble because we’re succombing to our own rapidly increasing moral stupidity.

Let me say more about that right now.

In a fair and legitimate contest, if the American people were presented with two competing ideologies, agendas and plans, I still believe that the American people would choose the more noble path. But that is not what is happening here. Instead, Obama and the Democrats are not bothering to present a meaningful plan of their own which would expose their true nature and intentions to the people; rather, they are sitting back and demaoguing and demonizing the Republicans as they try to lead in the leadership vaccum created by failed leader Obama.

And up to this point, that tactic – as vile and despicable as it is – has actually been working. The American people are actually turning against the Republicans and taking their doses of poison that the biased and dishonest media keep feeding them. The media is simply routinely lying.

A senior banking official told FOX Business that administration officials have provided guidance to them that even though a default is off the table, a downgrade “is a real possibility for no other reason than S&P and Moody’s have to cover (themselves) since they’ve [that’s Obama and Geithner] been speaking out on the debt cap so much.”

Now, if you have total confidence in the wisdom and goodness of the American people, I can understand why you believe they will see through this.

I simply no longer do. Because Obama played the same game with his terrible stimulus boondoggle; he played the same game with ObamaCare; and he has played the same game with virtually everything else he has done. And assuming the American people are stupid and selfish has worked for him since they proved that to be true by voting for him in the first place.

So the real battle here isn’t “who’s more conservative?” It’s more about, “What’s the most conservative plan that will win the day?” Charles Krauthammer has said we should vote for THE most conservative candidate or plan that has a reasonable chance to win. And I agree with that; otherwise the “perfect” becomes the enemy of the good. And the conservative agenda goes nowhere.

The rub is that we often don’t know the answer to the question, “Who is the most conservative candidate who has a reasonable chance of winning?” or “What is the most conservative plan that can actually pass?”

It’s easy to throw up a Christine O’Donnell or a Sharon Angle. You might dismiss them as “establishment conservatives,” but your Charles Krauthammers and your Karl Roves warned and predicted that they would lose badly and that in losing these races we would lose the United States Senate when we could have won it with more electable candidates. I also understand that it is equally easy to throw up your hands as a conservative and point out that if we don’t have good candidates who will actually be conservative, there’s not much point in their winning in the first place. I truly see both sides here – as I imagine you do.

Damn my lack of omniscience!

Is there any way out of this dilemma for ordinary conservatives and for conservative politicians alike?

If John Boehner isn’t “conservative” enough, he should have been replaced. But as it is, he’s what we’ve got; he’s who we have. And we either follow his lead or we disintergrate into a bunch of factions that cannot possibly succeed in anything.

Even Rep. Allen West (R., Fla.), a freshman and tea-party favorite, told National Review Online that while the plan was a “75 to 80 percent solution,” it was something he could ultimately support. “You know, son, one thing they tell you in the military — if you sit around and wait to come up with the 100 percent plan, then the enemy has probably already attacked you,” he said.

The House has been leading. If you want conservative principles, there is simply nowhere else you can go if you want to have any chance of actually passing anything.

Speaker John Boehner is our General Eisenhower. If a bunch of officers had said, “I don’t like Ike’s plan; I’m going to hold out for a better one,” we would be speaking German right now.

When we are in a battle, what we really need most is unity. And that’s why I support my Republican House leadership through this fight.

For the record, I’m not saying Republicans should “compromise” with Democrats. I find Democrats utterly untrustworthy and in fact despicable; and you can’t “compromise” with vermin. What I AM saying is that Republicans should compromise with their own Republican leadership.

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” And Abraham Lincoln said even more famously, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” That idea is the core of my argument for supporting Speaker John Boehner.

I would rather have the cut, cap and balance plan than the one that Boehner is working on now. For the record, Speaker Boehner HIMSELF has repeatedly stated that HE would rather have the cut, cap and balance plan too. But he is looking at the situation, at the political landscape, at details that you and I don’t possess, and as our field commander he is saying that we need to pass a plan that will better position the Republican Party in this fight from the charge of being “hyper-partisan” or “unreasonable.”

And I am with my general in this fight.

For the record, had John Boehner decided that the cut, cap and balance plan was the hill to fight and die on, I would have been with him on that, too.

If the Tea Party conservative Republicans who oppose the Boehner plan successfully voted him out of his Speakership and replaced him, I would back that Tea Party conservative Speaker of the House.

But that isn’t what we’ve got. We’ve got Speaker of the House John Boehner, and our Speaker believes we need to get behind a plan that he acknowledges is less than perfect, but which he also says is our best chance of moving forward:

“Listen, it’s time to do what is doable, and this bill isn’t perfect. … That’s what happens when you have a Democrat-controlled Senate and a Democrat in the white House. This bill was agreed to by the bipartisan Senate leadership, and we believe we can get this on the president’s desk, and make it law. Listen, we’re not going to give him a $2.5 trillion blank check that lets him continue his spending binge through the next election. That’s not going to happen.”

I want the most conservative bill that has a chance of advancing or at least has the best chance of putting the Democrats in a political hole. And I believe that we need to trust the political instincts of our leadership to get us to that point.

Speaker Boehner is saying, “Get your ass in line.” And until this fight is over, I believe we should be saying, “Yes, sir!” Because the alternative is to splinter and divide into a bunch of factions that cannot accomplish anything.

Update: Boehner is arguing – legitimately – that there is going to be a debt deal one way or another. And if his play doesn’t work now, he will have no choice but to assemble a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans to pass the Reid bill in the Senate. If Boehner’s bill passes, that bill will have to be considered in any negotiation; if it fails, the House Republicans and the conservative agenda will have been become meaningless because it will be bypassed. There is simply too much at stake to play chicken, in my opinion. We’ve lost 500 points in the DOW already in just the first 4 days of the week BEFORE the deadline. August 2 will be a bloodbath.

If you believe that defeating John Boehner and fracturing the Republican House will lead to some kind of conservative agenda victory, you should be able to do something Obama hasn’t been able to come up with: a plan for how that will happen. If the markets collapse, a moderate coalition will form, pass something that is far worse than Boehner’s plan, and the House Republican leadership will be utterly broken with nearly a year and a half to go before the 2012 election.

John Boehner correctly recognizes that the House is one-half of one-third of our federal government; you simply cannot dictate the government from that foundation. It is simply lunacy at this point for a tiny minority of 26 Republicans to torpedo their party in a fanatic demand that they get 1,000% of everything they want. As it stands, Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are praying that the Boehner bill fails. Why on earth would Michelle Bachmann want to be the answer to these liberals’ prayers???

The US economy is quite probably the most vulnerable it has ever been in the history of the republic. Nobody knows what will happen in the coming weeks if we do not arrive at some kind of deal. The Boehner bill is the best solution possible for the nation, for the conservative agenda and for the Republican Party.

WH Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer: “We are seven days away from an unprecedented financial event in this country’s history. One that could potentially put us towards a depression because the House Republicans, led by Speaker Boehner, are unwilling to compromise one inch.”

Is it that bad, or is this a rare degree of fearmongering and demagoguing? And if it IS that bad, shouldn’t Barack Obama have SOME KIND OF DAMN PLAN OF HIS OWN TO PROVIDE ANY KIND OF GUIDANCE OR LEADERSHIP AT ALL?!?!?

The problem is hardly Republicans. This country has had Republicans ever since Abraham Lincoln led this nation through the Civil War. If you actually want to look at Republicans, THEY’RE THE ONLY ONES WHO’VE HAD ANY ACTUAL PLANS AT ALL; THEY’RE THE ONLY ONES WHO ACTUALLY VOTED ON AND PASSED A PLAN THAT WOULD ACTUALLY SAVE US FROM A CREDIT RATING DOWNGRADE. The problem is that we have an abject failure of a president who is clearly way in over his head.

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH): Where’s the president’s plan? When is he going to lay his cards on the table?

Senator Marco Rubio understood this when he utterly destroyed Bob Schieffer on CBS’ “Face The Nation” program after Schieffer – in his masquerade as a “neutral reporter” cited the Obama talking point as the “objective” view:

“OK, so where’s the plan? Where’s the president’s plan? I’ve never seen a piece of paper with the president’s name on it that’s his plan to solve this crisis. I’ve seen press conferences. I’ve seen lectures that he’s given to the Congress. I’ve seen these press avails where the camera comes in and takes a bunch of pictures. I haven’t seen a plan. Where is the president’s plan?“

MS. AMANPOUR: You also heard what Jack Lew said if there was part of a big deal, it would involve entitlements –

SEN. KYL: But we have no idea what he’s talking about. That’s the problem. Republicans are not willing to make a deal based upon some vague commitment that, sometime in the future, the president might be willing to look at something that he won’t identify.

ED HENRY, FOX NEWS CHIEF WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: …If you basically have this Boehner plan that you say can’t get through the Senate and you’ve got a Reid plan that the Republicans don’t think you can get through the Senate or the House and you’re saying we want a compromise, what was the point of giving a prime-time address to the nation without an Obama plan and say neither of these other plans can work? Where’s his plan?

(CROSSTALK)

JAY CARNEY, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I understand the idea that there is not an Obama plan is like point…

HENRY: But there’s not one on paper.

CARNEY: …point No. 1 on the talking points issued by the Republican Party. I get it.

(CROSSTALK)

HENRY: No, no, no. That’s not a talking point. Show us the plan. It’s not a talking point. That’s unfair. Where’s the plan?

CROSSTALK)

CARNEY: First of all, the president put forward in detail his principles at George Washington University…

(CROSSTALK)

HENRY: Principles. Right. That’s not a plan.

CARNEY: …quite a lot of detail. The president stood before you, I can’t remember if you were here Friday night, some of you weren’t because you cut out early, but a lot of you were (GROANS FROM THE PRESS) and he put forward in detail with numbers what he’s willing to do. He then referred from the podium to the fact that White House officials would be briefing in detail.

Today, under intense pressure to produce the President’s debt limit plan, the White House asked, “Do you need something printed for you?” House Republicans have put forth multiple plans (posted online and yes, available in print) to avoid default and get our fiscal house in order by cutting spending and implementing serious budget reforms.

We are seven days out from August 2nd and the Administration has yet to release a plan.

NOTE:

Chuck Todd: Why not release the last offer that Boehner made you? You said if you don’t want to release your own plan, release that one. If that’s the last deal he made and you are willing to go back with a few minor tweaks release it.

Jay Carney: We have shown a lot of leg on what we were proposing.

Chuck Todd: Where?

Jay Carney: From the podium, right here.

(Laughter)

Todd: Why not just release that plan?

Carney: You need something printed for you? You can’t write it down? There is ample detail.

Jake Tapper: That’s not a plan. It was details of a plan, but it wasn’t a plan in the same way we are getting a plan on the House side or on the Senate side.

Chuck Todd: We don’t know what the Medicare thing is, we don’t know what the Social Security part of this is …
….

Chuck Todd: Why not put it out there? You guys went before the American people last night and said call your Members of Congress we want a compromise. Well you had a plan you were making the case for, that sounded like the compromise. Release it to the public.

All Obama has done is give demagogic speeches and press conferences. YOU CAN’T RUN THE COUNTRY ON A DAMN SPEECH. AND YOU CERTAINLY CAN’T RUN IT FROM THE PODIUM OF A PRESS SECRETARY DURING A DAMN PRESS CONFERENCE!!! SOMEBODY HAS TO ACTUALLY LEAD OR THIS COUNTRY IS DOOMED!!!

And Obama is refusing to lead, but instead cynically waiting for the Republicans to do so (because SOMEBODY has got to!) and then rallying his special interests to demonize the Republicans for offering specific proposals. He himself has offered NOTHING.

Obama has no plan whatsoever. He has come out with absolutely nothing specific whatsoever that can serve as any kind of a template. He has completely abdicated any leadership whatsoever. Several months ago offered a laughable budget that was so ridiculous (it would have added $12 trillion to the debt) that not even ONE DEMOCRATS would vote for it. It failed 97-0 in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Just how massive a failure is Obama? And since then he has offered NOTHING but fearmongering and demonization.

But Barack Obama and the Democrats are tyrants, not leaders. They want to rule, not govern. They want to impose a system that will result in a European socialist-style government until our country implodes from massive and unsustainable deficits and debts…. Nothing else will get done, and this country will drift …

Earlier this year there was a story in which Hillary Clinton expressed her disgust of Obama’s complete failure of leadership. There was this great quote [that article appears here]:

“Obviously, she’s not happy with dealing with a president who can’t decide if today is Tuesday or Wednesday, who can’t make his mind up,” a Clinton insider told The Daily. “She’s exhausted, tired.”

Even HILLARY CLINTON said that Obama is a wretched and utterly failed leader who can’t make up his mind.

I remember several years ago watching a fascination PBS program on presidential leadership. The documentary’s poster-boy for pathetic presidential leadership was Jimmy Carter. Obviously the man was intelligent, but the experts on leadership said “intelligence” does not a leader make. Jimmy Carter was particularly faulted for not empowering his subordinates with enough power to do their jobs; he micromanaged and undermined through a tiny cadre of close advisors. And as a result the nation drifted like a ship without a rudder. That is clearly what is being described by Hillary Clinton now.

The PBS program did not make mention of the fact that Jimmy Carter was (and clearly still is) a fool with a totally bogus worldview. A false worldview makes it impossible to act intelligently because, no matter how intelligent one is, one cannot possibly comprehend reality. And I would submit that Both Carter and Obama have tragically and truly flawed views of the world. Both of these men view the world through a set of theories that are simply totally false. And from their poor foundations, all of their intelligence goes into the fruitless process of endlessly rationalizing and justifying their erroneous worldview.

And I was so right about this fraud.

This is beyond frightening. There was NEVER anything about Obama’s story that indicated that the man had ever developed any kind of actual leadership ability whatsoever. He was a community organizer who became a state senator who voted “present” more than he voted aye or nay. He served in the United States Senate for 142 days before breaking his promise to serve his first Senate term. And as president he has never done anything more than campaign. Even during this debt ceiling fiasco, Obama was gone an average of every three days doing another damned fundraiser.

And now we are in a situation in which we desperately need a leader and we do not have one.

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH): Where’s the president’s plan? When is he going to lay his cards on the table?

Senator Marco Rubio understood this when he utterly destroyed Bob Schieffer on CBS’ “Face The Nation” program after Schieffer – in his masquerade as a “neutral reporter” cited the Obama talking point as the “objective” view:

“OK, so where’s the plan? Where’s the president’s plan? I’ve never seen a piece of paper with the president’s name on it that’s his plan to solve this crisis. I’ve seen press conferences. I’ve seen lectures that he’s given to the Congress. I’ve seen these press avails where the camera comes in and takes a bunch of pictures. I haven’t seen a plan. Where is the president’s plan?“

MS. AMANPOUR: You also heard what Jack Lew said if there was part of a big deal, it would involve entitlements —

SEN. KYL: But we have no idea what he’s talking about. That’s the problem. Republicans are not willing to make a deal based upon some vague commitment that, sometime in the future, the president might be willing to look at something that he won’t identify.

Late last week, the Senate structured four votes on motions to proceed to the budget plans of President Obama , Rep. Ryan, Senators Pat Toomey (R.-Pa.) and Rand Paul (R.-Ky.) The vote on President Obama’s budget was a humiliating 0-97. The President lacks any support for his $3.7 trillion plan for next year, which would create $8.7 trillion in new spending, $1.6 trillion in new taxes and add $13 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years.

It was shot down 97-0 in the Senate, with not one single Senator – one single DEMOCRAT – willing to sign on to this incredibly laughable and even more incredibly destructive plan.

The Republicans passed a budget (the Ryan Plan). That is the first budget that had seen the light of day since 2009. Because the Democrats never bothered to pass a budget for fiscal year 2011 as was their duty in spite of the fact that they had total control of the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Well, other than the asinine piece of crap that Obama tried to foist on America between his golf rounds that got blasted down 97-0.

Most Americans may well think that Obama is leading and has a plan simply because the mainstream media is so pathologically dishonest that Joseph Goebbels is looking up from “Minister of Propaganda hell” and smiling. But the simple fact of the matter is that Barack Obama has nothing but Marxist class warfare and about a gazillion tons of demagoguery to go with ZERO-POINT-ZERO-ZERO LEADERSHIP.

Frankly, there aren’t enough words or superlatives in the English dictionary to describe the great Thomas Sowell. With an unparalleled gift to explain even the most complicated subjects in simple and easily understandable terms, few can match the pedigree and contributions of the Hoover Institute senior fellow. Author of the new book, “Dismantling America,” Sowell recently sat down for an interview with Investors Business Daily’s David Hogberg. And along with a few priceless jabs at Michelle Obama, sociology, Newsweek, and the public education system, Dr. Sowell discussed why he (like Niall Ferguson) believes America may be entering a prolonged period of decline.

“The only analogy I can think of from history is when the Norman conquerors of England published their laws in French for an English-speaking nation,” Sowell says about the Obama administration’s governing style, a style he characterizes as unconstitutional.

As someone who, if forced to, would label himself as more libertarian than conservative — though he has irked many with his support of American combat missions in Iraq — most noteworthy (and a bit shocking) about the interview is what Sowell believes the greatest threat is — terrorism, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the international scene. Questioned as to what some of the current markers of national decline are, it isn’t “huge bills that fundamentally change the way the economy operates,” reckless government spending, social engineering programs and the national debt which worry the economist the most, it is national security and President Obama’s foreign policy.

And Sowell makes a few not-so-subtle Neville Chamberlain analogies that are almost impossible to ignore:

Of course, the one that trumps them all is on the international scene. That’s where Iran is moving toward nuclear weapons. I’m just staggered at how little attention is being paid to that compared to frivolous things. If a nation with a record of sponsoring international terrorism gets nuclear weapons, that changes everything and it changes it forever.

Someday historians may wonder what were we thinking about when you look at the imbalance of power between the U.S. and Iran, and we sat there with folded hands and watched this happen, going through just enough motions at the United Nations to lull the public to sleep. That, I think, is the biggest threat.

Sowell also condemns the president for affronting our allies (in particular, the British and Israelis) in “clever” yet unmistakable ways the general public may not notice, further hastening America’s decline:

His first foreign policy gambit was to fly to Russia and offer to renege on the American commitment to put a missile shield in Eastern Europe…All he really got out of that was a demonstration of his amateurishness and of his willingness to sell out allies in hopes of winning over enemies. That ploy was tried in the 1930s and didn’t work all that well.

These are no ordinary times, with no ordinary president. Leading up to the historic “Hope and Change” election, commentators on the Right could not possibly have attacked Obama and his intentions to fundamentally change the identity and economy of America more than they already had. Even so, not only has President Obama fulfilled every single “fear-mongering” indictment down to a tee, he’s exceeded them — making even some his most extreme opponents look clairvoyant. So with keeping that in mind, and considering all the new challenges we face domestically, that one of the greatest economic minds of our time would still elevate national security and terrorism to such a level truly speaks volumes about the reality and situation of Iran.

Also citing the lack of expertise and national discussion in international issues, former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton confirmed to Greg Gutfeld that he was seriously considering a presidential run on Red Eye last week. Bolton-Sowell 2012? One can only dream. But hey, if a community organizer can get elected, why not someone with ten times the accomplishments and wisdom?

I’ve said many of the same things, myself. Just not as well, and not as succinctly. For example, I said:

If Iran gets its nukes, it will be able to do a number of things: 1) attack Israel, assuring Israel that if it uses its nukes against Iran, Iran will use its nukes against Israel; 2) shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which would immediately drive up the price of oil. The cost of gasoline in the U.S. would soar above $15 a gallon; 3) dramatically increase Iranian-sponsored terrorism worldwide.

If you don’t believe that a nuclear-armed Iran would pick a minimum of one of these options, you’re just nuts.

It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Iran is employing a lot of rocket scientists to create a ballistic nuclear missile capable of striking the United States and Israel. But when Democrats are in charge, even the most trivial aspects of common sense are akin to the most sophisticated form of theoretical mathematics.

“DES MOINES — Democratic presidential candidates teamed up during a National Public Radio debate here Tuesday to blast the Bush administration over its policy toward Iran, arguing that a new intelligence assessment proves that the administration has needlessly ratcheted up military rhetoric.

While the candidates differed somewhat over the level of threat Iran poses in the Mideast, most of themsought to liken the administration’s approach to Iran with its buildup to the war in Iraq.”

But the fact that the failure to deal with Iran rests ENTIRELY in Democrats’ hands won’t stop them from blaming Bush when Iran rears its vicious head against the world. Any more than it stopped them from blaming Bush for the 2008 economic collapse in spite of the fact that they had had total control of Congress for the previous two years, and even though they had repeatedly prevented Bush from regulating and reforming GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – which were at the epicenter of the disaster.

It’s just what cowards do. And the Democrat Party is the party of moral cowardice going back to at least the Carter years, if not dating back to the waning days of the LBJ administration.

You can go back and review the record. Nearly 60% of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate (29 out of 50) voted to authorize the Iraq War Resolution. Furthermore, virtually every single top Democrat was on the factual record agreeing with George Bush and supporting his reasoning to attack Saddam Hussein –

– and yet Democrats en masse cowardly, despicably, and I would argue treasonously, turned on Bush and turned on our troops in time of war. For no other reason than to treacherously obtain a cheap political advantage aided and abetted by a mainstream media propaganda apparatus that could have come right out of the vile brain of Joseph Goebbels.

In addition to their opposition to the Iraq War (which again 60% of Senate Democrats voted for, only to repudiate and claim Bush deceived them), Democrats opposed the Patriot Act; opposed Domestic Surveillance which allowed the US to track calls from international terrorists into the United States; opposed Gitmo, even though it is the clearly the ONLY reasonable place to hold incredibly dangerous terrorists that no country wants; opposed allowing terrorists to be tried in military tribunals to safeguard intelligence techniques and personnel, and to prevent the court system from being hijacked by enemies of freedom; opposed even the most reasonable use of profiling to weed out terrorists intent upon murdering Americans; and even declared surrender in the vile “I believe that … this war is lost” statement of Harry Reid, the Democrat Senate Majority Leader. I could go on. It boils down to the fact that the left despise anything that help us win the war on terror or protect us from terrorism.

"RUN AWAY!!!"

To the extent that Barack Obama has done anything – ANYTHING – right at all in the war on terror, it has only been because he repudiated himself and demonstrated that he was either an incompetent fool or a lying hypocrite. Obama – after publicly denouncing, undermining and alienating the CIA – has continued the policy of “torture” by continuing the policy of “rendition” in which terror suspects are sent to other countries that use torture. Obama – after continually denouncing Bush over Gitmo – has STILL not closed the facility down two full years after usurping the office of the presidency with lies. Obama is using a surge strategy in Afghanistan after denouncing Bush’s successful surge strategy in Iraq and blatantly predicting it would fail. And Obama is now continuing the Bush policy of using predator drones to attack terrorist positions inside Pakistan that US Special Operations forces cannot reach.

Iran WILL get the nuclear bomb. Democrats guaranteed that Iran would be able to do so.

Iran will become a plague upon global peace and security unlike anything the world has ever seen at least since the rise of the Nazis and the abject failure of FDR and Neville Chamberlain to deal with the clear and present danger.

And when that day comes, America will be unable to meaningfully deal with it because Barack Obama and the Democrat Party made us economically incapable of rising to any significant occasion.

Milkwujee [sic]: The US birth rate has dropped for the second year in a row, and experts think the wrenching recession led many people to put off having children. The 2009 birth rate also set a record: lowest in a century. Births fell 2.7 per cent last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show.

“It’s a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing a decline from the year before,” said Stephanie Ventura, the demographer who oversaw the report. The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That’s down from 14.3 in 2007 and way down from 30 in 1909, when it was common for people to have big families. “It doesn’t matter how you look at it — fertility has declined,” Ventura said.

The situation is a striking turnabout from 2007, when more babies were born in the United States than any other year in the nation’s history. The recession began that fall, dragging stocks, jobs and births down. “When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about their financial future, they tend to postpone having children. We saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s and we’re seeing that in the Great Recession today,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University. “It could take a few years to turn this around,” he added, noting that the birth rate stayed low throughout the 1930s.

As the report shows, it’s actually the lowest in a lot more than a hundred years. But we’ll go with the lamestream media’s headline. The REAL news here is that – while the low birthrate is being blamed on the recession – the birthrate is actually lower than it was during the Great Depression years (it was 21.3 births per 100 Americans in 1930, the year AFTER the Depression began).

The birth rate is shockingly down for not one but two years in a row. Which is contrasted with 2007 (“Miss me yet?”), when more babies were born to Americans than at any time in our history. The Democrats under Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would soon screw that up, however.

And now, Obama has not only crushed “hope” in America, but love as well.

Gotta ask: how’s that “Marxist as Moscow” “hopey changey” thing working out for ya here in “God damn America”?

The media is depicting this frightening news that American can’t replenish it’s population and is now going the way of the Dodo bird to the impact of the recession. It’s the economy, stupid. There’s only one problem with that: it wasn’t this bad in the GREAT DEPRESSION.

Now, I remember when Obama was campaigning for office and when he was trying to ram his stimulus – that he said would keep employment under 8% – through a Democrat-owned Congress. Those were the days when Obama

… turned fearmongering into an art form. He has repeatedly raised the specter of another Great Depression. First, he did so to win votes in the November election. He has done so again recently to sway congressional votes for his stimulus package.

In his remarks, every gloomy statistic on the economy becomes a harbinger of doom. As he tells it, today’s economy is the worst since the Great Depression. Without his Recovery and Reinvestment Act, he says, the economy will fall back into that abyss and may never recover.

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong… somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises… I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started… And an enormous debt to boot!” – Henry Morganthau, FDR’s Treasury Secretary, May 1939

But at least the people had confidence -however misplaced – in FDR’s leadership.

At this point, Obama is demonstrating that he cannot lead. And in a way it’s not his fault; there was never anything in his life experience that indicated he could lead. Community organizer? Obscure Illinois State Representative [who used thug tactics to come from nowhere to claim the seat]? One-term Senator (who promised he’d serve his first six-year term but then ran for President after 158 days???)??? [….]

He is a total failure. We don’t have a leader, we just have a guy who campaigns for four years. The country will begin to increasingly drift until we get a real president.

And boy oh boy was I ever right.

Here’s a short list of news reports I came up with that revealed how America was in the grip of disaster while Obama was on vacation gripping a golf club:

WASHINGTON — Government anti-poverty programs that have grown to meet the needs of recession victims now serve a record one in six Americans and are continuing to expand.

One major problem facing the country is that millions of Americans are glad that Obama is giving them welfare, versus the Americans who would rather have a president who leads the nation as a whole out of poverty and back to prosperity.

It’s not just Obama’s bad economy that is causing Americans to stop having babies and start fading away as a nation; it’s not even his terrible policies that are sustaining that bad economy; it’s his total failure of leadership that is creating this unparalleled lack of confidence in America’s future.

There seems to be a genius to Obama’s incompetence. He is failing on so many levels, in so many ways, all at the same time, that nobody can possibly keep track of them all.

Which means, paradoxically, that the more failures Obama accumulates, the better he looks, as coverage of all the failure is dissipated such that nothing receives the focus it needs to penetrate the American culture of distraction.

Obama is turning to Bush’s general and Bush’s Secretary of Defense in order to overcome the failure created by utterly failed Democrat Party ideas.

Chief among those utterly failed Democrat ideas is the timetable for cut-and-run. Democrats wanted to impose this guaranteed-to-fail strategy for Iraq, but Bush prevailed and won the war. Now they want to make sure we lose in Afghanistan, as Afghans who want to stay alive realize who will still be there a year from now (i.e., the Taliban), and who won’t (i.e., the United States), and that they’d better not ally themselves with their “timetable for withdrawal” all-too-temporary American allies.

Of course, the failure in Afghanistan comes as a welcome relief to day 72 of the even bigger failure in the Gulf of Mexico.

The leftwing media is essentially shouting, “Hey, take your eye off that total failure over there on the Gulf Coast. Look over here!!! Obama fired a guy that pricked his thin-skin and appointed Bush’s general to save his liberal ass. And he gave a speech!!! Don’t waste your time thinking about the fact that BP took the cap off the leaking hole so that 104,000 gallons of oil per hour could pour out of the sea floor. Don’t look at the possibility that as much as 4.2 million gallons of oil are pouring out of that damn hole Obama can’t plug every single day!!!

Where are we supposed to look to see an area in which Obama HASN’T failed?

Look at everything, if you have time to contemplate all the failure that Obama has brought. But don’t be distracted from taking time to watch the spill cam footage every day, or following the latest tracking of Obama’s oil spill and its contamination of the Gulf Coast, or following the Obama-regime-caused inability to clean up the mess.

As you watch the daily disaster unfolding, don’t forget to remember that Obama is the guy running the show. Or that the show looks like a chicken running around after its head has been cut off